


The Rip

by perihadion



Series: Shadowboxing [12]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, i am once again asking you to suffer with me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22974751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perihadion/pseuds/perihadion
Summary: After receiving information that Din and the Child are in danger Cara hitches a ride across the galaxy to try to save them.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: Shadowboxing [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599208
Comments: 54
Kudos: 166





	1. yesterday i woke up sucking a lemon

**Author's Note:**

> Do not comment with Omera hate.

There was nothing unusual about the day the worst thing happened, at least in the beginning: that was what Din would remember later. He and the Child had wandered from planet to planet in the Outer Rim for some weeks since he turned in his last quarry. He had taken to letting the Child sit on his knee as he looked at the star charts and indicate where they should search next: he had no more idea where to find the Child’s people than the Child himself anyway.

On this day they had arrived at a planet the Child had cooed and pointed at with no more than the usual sense of urgency so when he tugged impatiently at Din’s cloak with a little whine Din had assumed he was just eager to stretch his legs outside the confines of the Razor Crest.

Later it would occur to him that perhaps the Child had sensed something running through the undercurrent of the universe around this planet, that maybe something had called to him. Maybe the Imperial remnant had known something about what might call to the Child here.

He had felt lighter than usual — almost optimistic — as he followed the Child, who had toddled forward with uncharacteristic focus. Maybe something in the hidden dimension of reality which the Child could sense had made Din feel this way, or maybe things had been quiet for them too long and Din had started to take for granted that he and the Child would always be together.

He should have been alert.  
He should have known the danger.  
He should have kept the Child in his arms.

But these were all realisations he would have later.

Reality fractured. The Child was gone. Dozens of shadows descended. Blaster shot. Fire. Blood. He heard the Child’s screams retreating from him, further, and further. Flames licked around him. Ears ringing. He had fought right until the edge between life and death. He was dying.

Then more shouting, and a familiar form emerging from the smoke. A familiar face floating before his, mouthing his name. He blacked out.

* * *

Cara was too late: the trap had sprung by the time she reached Phism. She ran headfirst through the flames and acrid black smog. Her lungs burned. The hunters had scattered in every direction: she knew one of them must have the Child but she had to get to Din. She prayed they had underestimated him. She prayed that he was still alive.

She saw him glinting in the light from the fire, and pushed forward to where he lay in the midst of what looked like incredible destruction. He must have given everything.

* * *

“The Child,” Din choked out, shoving at Cara as she tried to put her arm under his shoulder. “Cara, the Child.”

“I know,” he heard her say close to his ear, as she dragged him to his feet. “But I can’t get him back without you.” He felt himself blacking out again but Cara supported his weight, half dragging him in the direction of the Razor Crest.

His head was pounding and he was shaking but as they spilled through the entrance to the ship together the fire of resolve burned in his gut and he was able to stumble towards the cockpit and collapse into the chair.

Cara started inputting something on the navigational computer as he fired up the engines. “Coordinates,” she said, but he had no strength to respond or even begin to understand any of this. All he could do was breathe and fly. All he could think of was the Child.

The moment between space and hyperspace seemed to stretch out agonisingly, and he became aware of every pain, the blood rushing in his ears, even the burning of the engines behind him. His hands shook.

He felt Cara kneel by him and put her hand on his knee. “Din, we need to get you patched up,” she said and, as he tilted his head to look at her, he saw that she was bracing for argument. But he knew she was right: he had to prepare for what came next, he was in no condition to fight. He nodded.

* * *

He looked broken, slumping in the chair as soon as they hit hyperspace, as if everything that was Din had vacated his armour and left it empty. Soulless, she thought.

She put her arm under his shoulder again and helped him to stand. It would take some time for them to get close enough to the Child to use the tracking fob she had. She pushed the thought that her intelligence might be wrong out of her mind: it had been right so far. All she had wished for as she hitched her ride from Nevarro with a blaster aimed at the pilot’s head was that the information would be bad: now she hoped against hope that it was good.

Din supported himself against the wall as she took off his armour piece by piece, leaving his helmet for last. She placed a hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, and left it there for a moment — hoping he understood what she was trying to say: that she would be by his side if it meant ripping the galaxy apart atom-by-atom to get the kid back.

She stripped him naked and, testing the temperature of the water, helped him into the shower.

He leant against the wall of the shower, forehead resting against the metal. He was in bad shape: the water ran down him in bloody rivers, revealing all his scars, fresh cuts, and flowering bruises. And he was trembling.

Cara felt herself breaking. She stepped into the shower, fully-clothed, and put her arms around him. He coughed out a sob. She held him as tight as she could despite his injuries because she knew he needed it: without his armour, without someone or something holding him together, he would fall apart. The water ran over them as he sobbed, as Cara gripped him tight.

“We’re getting him back,” she said.

He said nothing, but his breathing was evening out. She stepped back from him and he straightened up, turning his face up towards the water — towards the heavens someone might have said, if they were planet-bound and not skimming across the surface of reality itself.

“I’ll, um —” she paused to clench her jaw together to stop herself from crying, “I’ll let you get cleaned up. There’s bacta here.” He nodded, eyes still closed.

She turned to walk back to the cockpit, pausing for just a moment when she stepped on something small and soft on the floor: the Child’s stuffed frog, which had fallen out of Din’s clothes when she was undressing him. She picked it up and placed it on top of the pile next to the med kit and then walked through to the cockpit.

The light on the commlink was blinking. She swallowed. That would be the warning Karga had transmitted to Din as she raced across the galaxy. She thought about deleting it before Din saw it, removing the burden of what-ifs for him. But it didn’t matter: he would realise they would have tried to contact him. And it was better to live in harsh reality even when it felt like it might kill you.

She thought about the Child being spirited away across the galaxy by ghouls who would do who-knows-what with him. The Empire had taken everything from her, and everything from Din, and it was still taking from them even now. It was supposed to be over. They were supposed to have won. She slammed her fist into the wall. She wouldn’t let it. She would hunt down every last remaining Imp and kill them herself, all the slippery, shifting things. She would burn them all up and spit them out. It was too much. They had taken too much from her.

* * *

When Cara went to check on Din she found that he was already dressed and looked stronger. His shoulders had that familiar, determined set. He was standing and looking at the last remaining piece of his apparel: the helmet. He looked up at her as she walked in and then looked back at the helmet.

“I understand now,” he said, half to her and half to himself. “It didn’t feel like a lie.” He picked the helmet up. “But if the kid dies —”

“Din —” she said, desperately.

He shook his head. “If the kid dies,” he repeated, “I will never be able to put this on again.” He slipped the helmet on over his head and looked at her.

She thought she was beginning to understand too. Everything he is, everything he was: what it meant to him to be a Mandalorian. To fail in this, to fail to protect his foundling — he could never inhabit that identity again. He would be nothing, less than nothing: soulless, empty. Forsaken.

“We’re going to get him back,” she said, pushing all her fear and doubt to the bottom of her gut so that she could say this to him with conviction: “We have to.”


	2. everything in its right place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had intended this to be a two-part story but structurally I think it's better to break the second chapter up so there's one more chapter to come after this one.

Cara stood behind Din in the unending silence which settled on the Razor Crest like a layer of suffocating dust. They said nothing s they traversed hyperspace to the coordinates Cara hd input. He had not asked her how she knew, where she got her intelligence. She recognised that this betrayed a level of trust on his part that she hoped she had earned.

In the end she broke the silence. “I should have been there,” she said. He tilted her head a little, almost imperceptibly, in her direction.

“It would have made no difference,” he said. 

That was not what she had meant, she knew it would have made no difference. Even if Cara had been there they would have been overwhelmed, the Child still would have been lost. Nothing would have changed, she knew that. But she had no words to tell him what she was feeling: that she should have been there even though it would have made no difference, maybe that it was even more important that she be there in that case. Because, because —

Because of all the people scattered throughout the galaxy Cara was the one who should have been with him in his worst moment. Of all the people in the universe she should have been there by his side whether it made any difference or not. Even if it made no difference — maybe _because_ it made no difference — she, the one who knew his face, who carried part of his soul inside her, should have been there when he needed her.

* * *

Din closed his eyes. There were so many attackers, Cara must realise she could not have saved them. He was the Child’s father, he should have been strong enough to protect him. “It was my responsibility,” he said.

He felt Cara place her hand on his pauldron and wondered in the back of his mind if she remembered he could feel it — the ghost of an impression. He felt all at the same time like her touch might break him and like it was the only thing holding him together. Maybe it was. He would have died without her, and then what would have happened to the baby?

She would have rescued the Child, he knew.

Or died trying.

* * *

The planet they arrive at is unknown to Cara, and she feels a stab of fear in her gut that this is not the place and the Child is lost forever. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before looking at the fob in her hand: it blinks. The Child is here. She looks at Din, and he nods.

They scan the planet. It is quiet, there is almost no population to speak of. But there is a large underground complex.

“The fob is our only way of finding the Child once we’re in,” Din said. Cara nodded. She understood the need for stealth. The plan they formulated was transparent but it didn’t matter, all Cara needed was to draw the two Storm Troopers guarding the entrance into the open where Din could snipe them before they raised the alarm.

She ran her hands over the beskar starting with his pauldrons in the ritualistic checking for damage that she had first performed for him on Arvala-7 so many cycles ago. Even now, when she had charted every scar on his skin, and run her hands over his face — when she had _seen_ him, taken part of him irrevocably inside her — the act felt like an expression of trust on his part that she did not deserve. Even now it was somehow one of the deepest expressions of intimacy they shared. When she had finished she placed her hand on his chestplate, over his heart, where she knew he was strongest and weakest at the same time.

She met his gaze, behind the visor, and he nodded.

* * *

“Hi!” Cara said, as soon as the door to the compound opened. The two Storm Troopers guarding the entrance had their guns aimed at her but even at close range that was not much cause for concern. She made a show of raising her hands. “Look, I’m a little lost and I was hoping you could help me out.”

The Storm Troopers looked at each other and then back at her.

“Yeah, my buddy and I landed here and he sent me out to scout the area but totally can’t remember where we landed the ship. Embarrassing, right?” She paused to make a sort of shrugging gesture with her hands still above her head then she jerked her head behind her and said, “Look it would help me out a lot if you could step out here and help me figure out the right direction.”

One of the Storm Troopers started to step forward and the other angled his gun to stop him.

“Oh, come on,” Cara said. “You can see I don’t even have a blaster. I just want you to show me the way and then I’ll be out of your hair. I promise this is an honest mistake.”

The Storm Troopers looked at each other and the one who had stopped his partner from approaching her shrugged. “All right,” he said. The other stepped into the open but before he could say anything he burst into a cloud of golden sparks. At the same time, before the cautious one could sound the alarm, Cara ran forward and, grabbing his blaster, shot him in the head. His body crumpled to the ground and she pulled him through the entrance. She waited for a moment in case the scuffle had alerted others and then she turned to look at the woods where she knew Din was concealed and made the signal.

* * *

As Din and Cara crept through the labyrinthine compound she held the tracking fob which guided them, since his task was to keep scanning for personnel approaching. The compound was staffed with a minimal number of Storm Troopers — but the whole operation was slick and reminiscent of an Empire base before the fall. Cara kept her mind focused on the task ahead, but the level of organisation was a shock despite what they had seen on Nevarro from Gideon.

They approached what seemed to be a laboratory, guarded again by two Storm Troopers. Here she and Din separated so that they could flank them, and silently took them out.

There were no laboratory personnel inside. When they entered they saw that the Child was being kept in a small cell behind a glass pane, and he was unconscious. The sight made Cara feel sick: it was clear that the Child was not asleep. Din approached the glass as Cara guarded the door.

“It’s probably alarmed,” he said. “But we don’t have time to figure that out. Be ready to run. I’m going to break it.”

“Do it,” she said.

She kept her eyes trained on the corridor as she heard him step back and ready his weapon, then there was a shattering noise — and a deafening siren. She started running, blaster out, ready to clear a path.

Her lungs burned. Storm Troopers were descending from all sides. If they could get out of the compound Din could fly the Child back to the Razor Crest. He was running ahead of her now as she covered him. If this was how she died then this was how she died. It would be worth it.

She felt the sudden punch of a blaster bolt in her right leg and went down. Din must have heard her hit the floor because he faltered, and looked back. “Go!” she shouted at him, but he hesitated. They were so close to daylight, Cara closed her eyes: she couldn’t live, even for the few minutes she had left, with the idea that Din and the Child would be pulled back into this hellhole because of her.

She felt someone grab her, and pull her. She tried to open her eyes but all of a sudden there was a searing bright light, and then she felt herself being lifted, lifted, lifted — and the world falling away from her.

It was Din.

He had saved her.


	3. nothing but blue skies from now on.

The first sensation Cara was aware of when she awoke was how much her head hurt — a deep, dull ache which made her feel sick. She blinked her eyes open and, as the ceiling of the bunk on the Razor Crest came into focus, the sore, searing pain in her leg bled into the edges of her consciousness. She lay there, not moving, staring at the ceiling, and hurting, for what felt like hours. She felt immobilised by a weight on her, pinning her to the bed: as distasteful as this moment was she wanted to stretch it out as long as possible — in case the next one was worse.

“You lost a lot of blood,” Din said. He sounded exhausted. She tilted her head, and then half-turned to look at him where he sat on the floor with his back to the wall. He _looked_ exhausted. His helmet rested next to him, and he had taken off most of his armour and his shirt and was cradling the baby to his bare chest.

“How is he?” she said, her voice cracking. She was gripped with the sudden fear that that Child had died, that Din was holding him like this in a tortured goodbye.

Din looked down at the bundle which looked so small in his arms. “He is sleeping,” he said, and Cara choked back a sob. He swallowed, and added, “He has been sleeping for a long time.”

“He’ll wake up,” she said, “won’t he?”

“I think so,” Din said, rocking the Child a little. “This has happened before but —“ he trailed off, and took a breath. “Circumstances were different,” he said.

“Can I hold him?” Cara asked. Din nodded and, getting up with some difficulty, placed him next to Cara, who turned onto her side to put her hand gently on his chest. She watched her hand rise and fall as Din crawled into the bunk behind her and put his hand on her waist.

“How do you feel?” he asked, his voice rumbling in her ear.

“Like shit,” she said. She stroked her fingers along the baby’s ears, and felt Din likewise running his fingers through her hair.

“You were wrong you know,” she said.

“About what?” he said, tracing circles over her cheek.

“About it being your responsibility,” she said, and his hand stopped. “I realised that when I was racing across the galaxy to find you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“I mean,” she took a deep breath, “— I mean that all this time we, or at least I, have been acting like I could just back out of this. Just walk away. Like I had a choice. But the truth is that I made my choice a long time ago. I’ve always known that. And I knew from the start that choice came with a heavy responsibility, I always knew that.”

“What are you saying?” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“Shit, I’m not good with words,” she said. “I mean that I chose to be with you and I knew what it meant. And I tried to pretend there weren’t any responsibilities that came with it, but I knew there were. And you’re wrong, the kid isn’t just your responsibility he’s mine too. And I should have been there.”

“It wouldn’t have made —”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” she said, cutting him off, “I know. I’m not saying it would have, I know it wouldn’t have.” She stroked the Child’s cheek and thought she saw his eyelids flicker. “That’s not why I should have been there. I should have been there because when the person you … love … faces something like that … you should be with them.”

He buried his face in her neck and she could feel that he was crying. He pressed a kiss into the nape of her neck and one to her shoulder, and whispered, “I love you too, Cara,” in her ear. She closed her eyes and pulled the Child close against her — as close as Din had pulled her into his body — and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

They lay there like that, drifting in and out of dreamless sleep together, for a few hours. Every so often Cara would wake thinking she had felt something stir beside her but when she opened her eyes the Child would be there, the same as ever, the only movement his soft, barely-perceptible breathing. After some time she felt herself waking from a dream of the sea on Alderaan to the sensation of a golden warmth spreading through her: at first it lapped over her like gentle waves lapping at her toes, and radiated from the blaster wound on her thigh. She sighed and opened her eyes and she saw the Child, his hand over her thigh, looking back at her.

His ears perked up when he noticed she had awoken, and she felt as if she would burst into a thousand iridescent bubbles. “Din,” she breathed, and felt him stir behind her. The Child was scrambling over her now, into the space opening up between their bodies as Din moved.

“ _Adi’ka_ ,” she heard Din say, his voice hoarse — and she felt, rather than knew, what the word meant. She turned over and saw that he was holding the Child tight and pressing their foreheads together as the Child reached his little hands up to Din’s face. She put her hands over the Child’s, covering his hands and Din’s cheeks. “ _Aliit ori’shya tal’din_ ,” he whispered so low she almost couldn’t hear it — and she thought she knew what that meant too.

They were a family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Aliit ori'shya tal'din_ — family is more than blood.


End file.
